Nationalism and the 'national question'

Letter: One king or another

Like Dale Street, Solidarity 486, I rather wonder whether the “pro-independence fundamentalists” who have described David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King as a “clarion call for Scottish independence” can possibly have been watching the same film I saw. The entire endeavour, both in terms of the actual film itself and the story it’s telling, end up feeling a little... well, pointless. Chris Pine gives a measured, reserved performance as Robert the Bruce, but with the effect that his reasons for risking everything to undertake a dangerous war against the English crown seem rather inscrutable, a mystery...

Luxemburg, economics, crises, and the national question

This article seeks to review and reflect on the two volumes of Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works published so far. Only a scattering - a much thicker scattering since the 1970s, but still a scattering - of Luxemburg's writings have been available in English until now. Since the 1970s there has been a "Collected Works" in German. Even that misses out a lot. The new Complete Works, edited by Peter Hudis, will be fourteen volumes. As Hudis explained in an article in Solidarity 356 (11/3/15: bit.ly/hudis-rl), "given the amount of time, care, and attention that she gave to developing her major...

Permanent revolution: Trotsky's theory and later constructions

From The Left in Disarray Central to the formation of the ideas of the ostensible left on imperialism and anti-imperialism has been the fact that the Orthodox Trotskyists conflated working-class socialist revolution and the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, in what they saw as a variant of Trotsky's permanent revolution. What is "permanent revolution", as Trotsky expounded it? The French revolution had been a particularly radical bourgeois revolution against the remnants of feudalism in France. Tsarist Russia needed a similar revolution to establish civil liberty and a...

Should we reverse history?

Sean Matgamna replies to Ashok Kumar's "National rights and the decolonial gaze" . More debate on the Right of Return here . Sometimes a person will have to do odd things for socialism. Trotsky recorded that when women induced the soldiers not to fire at the crowds at the outset of the February Revolution, they had to get at them by first crawling under the belly of Cossack horses. What Trotsky referred to so summarily loses much of its meaning in the minds of modern people who have no experience of horses. Your horse has a very small brain — the size of a chestnut, perhaps. A horse is...

A split in Iraqi socialist group

Nadia Mahmood of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq spoke to Martin Thomas about a split within her organisation. Nadia: The resignation of our comrades Muayad Ahmed and Yanar Mohammad was announced after the central committee’s decision to take away Falah Alwan’s membership of the party. MT: There must have been some political issues behind it, like the referendum? Nadia: We always have different political views in our party. We always take decisions based on votes. That is basic. As regards the referendum, we had our differences but we set them out. So it wasn’t an issue. And the referendum...

Nationalism and patriotism are dead ends for the left

The call to embrace patriotism is one heard over and over on the left. Particularly in the wake of Brexit and when the far-right is resurgent, many seek some way to ride the tide of nationalist sentiments. But for class-struggle socialists, the project of left-wing nationalism can only ever be politically incoherent and strategically a dead-end. Advocates of British left-nationalism (and English - see below) often draw on the freedom-fighting histories of heroic movements like the Chartists and suffragettes. But this requires assuming there was something particularly British in what socialists...

The ideas Lenin was arguing against in "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up"

These are the theses of the section of the Bolshevik Party which during World War 1 came out against "the right of nations to self-determination", and which Lenin argued against in "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up" https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm#bkV22E100 and "A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism", https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/carimarx/ 1. The imperialist epoch is a period of the absorption of small states by large states and of a constant redrawing of the political map of the world toward greater state homogeneity...

Catalonia impasse demands challenge to Rajoy

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy has scheduled the first session of Catalonia's new parliament for 17 January. Elections on 21 December gave a result similar to 2015. The pro-independence parties won a small majority of seats in the parliament (70/135 this time, 72/135 in 2015) with a slight minority of the votes (47.3% this time, 47.8% last time). Only now several of the leading pro-independence MPs are now held in Spanish jails for sedition, or self-exiled in Brussels for fear of being jailed if they return to Catalonia. On Friday 5 January Spain's Supreme Court refused bail to Oriol...

2018 day schools: Marxism, national questions, and nationalisms

Marxism, national questions, and nationalisms Selected reading (fuller list below): http://www.workersliberty.org/files/180217nationalquestion.pdf Agenda: 1. Basics from our tradition: the Marxist debates on the national question before 1914 2. How Orthodox Trotskyism skewed the tradition 4. Ireland 5. Israel-Palestine 6. Catalonia and the "Norwegian way" Reading: Trotsky's summary of the Bolsheviks and pre-1914 socialist debates on the national question - http://www.workersliberty.org/node/30022 Lenin - The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1913: his longest summing-up text on the issue...

Catalonia goes to the polls

The constitutional crisis in Catalonia continues to simmer as the region awaits elections on 21 December. A number of Catalan politicians and activists, including members of the recently dismissed government, have been denied bail and remain jailed on charges of sedition. Some are in exile in Belgium. The Spanish government has been directly administering Catalonia now since late October. While there have been large-scale demonstrations against the suspension of regional autonomy and political arrests, the civil disobedience among local government and regional police that some predicted has...

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